Is Gentrification Still Bad If Local Owners Profit from White Hipsters?: New at Reason

|||Liz Wolfe

Gentrification is often condemned for forcing poor people out of their homes and businesses, dismantling long-established communities. But what happens if a property’s owners don’t change, and in fact stand to richly profit from hipsters who want to sell each other rotisserie chickens and craft beer?

This is the situation unfolding in Holly, my neighborhood in East Austin. Lou’s Bodega opened a few weeks ago at 1900 East Cesar Chavez Street. This rapidly gentrifying street is home to a handful of dive bars, art studios, and shops; south of Cesar Chavez, much of the neighborhood is residential. The pattern is the same here as it is all over the country: Lines of sleek new houses inhabited mostly by white, childless couples are springing up next to smaller cottages built in the 1950s and ’60s. Holly is historically Hispanic and working-class, with a still-bustling Catholic church, Cristo Rey, that’s almost exclusively attended by Latinos.

If the proprietors of Lou’s thought they could move into their new spot without generating controversy, they were mistaken. The spot was formerly the home of Leal’s Tires. (The tire shop relocated to a nearby East 7th Street location. In a nice-guy and/or PR-savvy move, Lou’s provides free coffee to its employees.) The real estate where Lou is located is still owned by members of the Leal family, Emenencia and Abel Rodriguez, according to a spokesperson from McGuire Moorman Hospitality, the design, development, and management company responsible for Lou’s. So the Rodriguezes are still profiting from their stake in the neighborhood, and the tire shop employees are moving just a few blocks away.

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New Jersey Increases Minimum Wage by 70 Percent

GasThe “Ready for 15” crowd claimed a victory this week as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that will raise the statewide minimum wage from $8.85 an hour to $15 by 2024.

That win will be short-lived, though, as many employers will inevitably struggle to meet the steep increase in labor costs. Gas stations, in particular, may have a harder time affording attendants. “Local gas station owners testified before us that they cannot sustain employees and keep their businesses open without bringing in self-serve gas,” state Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R–Monmouth County) wrote this week.

That’s particularly nerve-wracking for the Garden State, which has a strange prohibition on customers pumping their own fuel. (The 1949 law was ostensibly enacted for safety reasons, but it was probably an attempt to curb competition when self-serve stations were still novel.) There are no plans to scrap the antiquated rule.

Even so, Murphy maintains that the mandated hike in pay will be good for workers.

“It is a great day to make some history for New Jersey’s working families,” the Democrat told a crowd of supporters. “And that’s just what we’re going to do.”

The minimum wage will increase this year to $10 per hour, then will rise by a dollar each year until it reaches $15. Private businesses have until July to implement the first bump in pay.

But the law takes effect immediately for government employees, who have typically been exempt from such pieces of legislation. Michael Cerra, assistant executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, says some communities will see a “significant” impact.

It “will probably require the increase of user fees, and potentially the reduction of positions or the reduction or elimination of services,” he tells Philly.com.

That ripple effect could be widespread, and it will hit employees in several state-sponsored areas—from animal shelters to election boards to schools—as well as the taxpayers who finance their salaries.

“We realize that contracted service providers that are impacted by this legislation will likely pass those costs onto us, which would inevitably be passed on potentially to taxpayers,” said Jonathan Pushman of the New Jersey School Boards Association. “Going up to $15 could cause stress on other areas of our budget, which could have a potentially negative impact on the education we provide our students.”

The hike will inevitably harm the most vulnerable. With a mere 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, the Fraser Institute estimates, the youngest and least experienced can expect to see a drop in employment of anywhere from 3 to 6 percent.

For New Jersey schools, that includes custodians, school bus aides, and substitute teachers, who might find themselves with fewer hours or without work entirely. Count student workers in that cohort too. Those part-time jobs—in athletic and administrative offices, for instance—aren’t meant to provide a living wage, but they’re being regulated as though they are.

Seasonal businesses have a bit longer to comply, with a mandated $10.30 per hour wage taking effect in January 2020. But no time is enough to prepare, according to Alli O’Neill, who owns the summer-prone Colonial Bakery on the Shore. She expects that the price of a dozen doughnuts will almost double, from $11 to $21.

“It’s not like I’m taking home so much that I can take it out of my pocket,” she tells the Ashbury Park Press. “I wish I could. I think there are big businesses out there that can do that. But the small businesses can’t.”

For Murphy, though, this is the only rational way forward. “We’ve talked long enough about putting New Jersey on a responsible path to $15 an hour minimum wage,” he said at the bill-signing. “Today we start our way on this path.”

That path will be slow-going, though, if New Jerseyans can’t pump their own gas.

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Massachusetts Supreme Court Says a Teen Who Told Her Boyfriend to Kill Himself Should Go to Jail

TextMichelle Carter, the Massachusetts teenager who encouraged her boyfriend to commit suicide and told him to “get back in” a carbon-monoxide-filled truck, will serve a 15-month prison sentence, the state’s supreme court ruled on Wednesday.

The decision upholds a lower court’s conclusion that Carter is guilty of involuntary manslaughter—that her words caused the death of Roy Conrad III in 2014. The young woman certainly said some very cruel things, and she bears some moral responsibility for what happened. But as I wrote in a 2017 column for The New York Times, to hold her legally responsible for Conrad’s death is worrisome:

While some states criminalize the act of convincing people to commit suicide, Massachusetts has no such law. Moreover, speech that is reckless, hateful and ill-willed nevertheless enjoys First Amendment protection. While the Supreme Court has carved out narrowly tailored exceptions for literal threats of violence and incitement to lawless action, telling someone they should kill themselves is not the same as holding a gun to their head and pulling the trigger. Nor is it akin to threatening to kill the president, which is specifically prohibited by law—and in any case, only considered a felony if done “knowingly and willfully.” (Merely expressing hope that the president dies isn’t enough.)

Judge Moniz’s verdict is a stunning act of defiance against this general principle. By finding Ms. Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter—rather than some lesser misdeed, such as bullying or harassment—the court has dealt a blow to the constitutionally enshrined idea that speech is not, itself, violence. That’s cause for concern.

My concerns are shared by the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which expressed concern that this decision might set a bad precedent for families and doctors discussing end-of-life options for the terminally ill.

Nevertheless, the Massachusetts Supreme Court believes the involuntary manslaughter finding is justified. “No constitutional violation results from convicting a defendant of involuntary manslaughter for reckless and wanton, pressuring text messages and phone calls, preying upon well-known weaknesses, fears, anxieties and promises, that finally overcame the willpower to live of a mentally ill, vulnerable, young person, thereby coercing him to commit suicide,” says the court’s ruling.

Carter’s attorneys have 28 days to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Mike Lee Teams Up With Kamala Harris to Scrap Green Card Caps

During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Donald Trump ad-libbed a line about wanting legal immigrants to enter the country in “the largest numbers ever.”

The first two years of his presidency might make you question the sincerity of that statement. But if Trump’s telling the truth, Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah) and Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) have a bill for him. The two lawmakers announced a plan today that would remove the annual per-country caps for employment-based green cards; it would also raise the cap on family-based green cards from 7 percent to 15 percent. While the Fairness for Highly Skilled Immigrants Act would not lift the overall caps on how many visas the United States grants in a single year, it would remove at least one major impediment for immigrants coming from places where many people waiting in line.

“Immigrants should not be penalized due to their country of origin,” Lee said in a statement.

The existing caps apply to both family-sponsored and employment-based visas. No more than 7 percent of either type of visa may be issued to natives of any one independent country in a fiscal year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS). Given the current overall caps on both types of green cards, that 7 percent per-country limit effectively means that no more than 25,620 immigrants from a single country can come to the United States in a single year.

“We must do more to eliminate discriminatory backlogs and facilitate family unity so that high-skilled immigrants are not vulnerable to exploitation and can stay in the U.S. and continue to contribute to the economy,” said Harris in a statement.

More than 300,000 would-be immigrants from India and more than 67,000 Chinese are currently on the waiting list for green cards, according to a 2018 CIS report.

David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that it’s not uncommon for immigrants from India to wait up to a decade for a green card, while Chinese immigrants frequently wait for three years or more. But if you’re lucky enough to be born in a different country, the caps mean you can move more quickly to the front of the line.

The per-country limits were imposed in 1924, and were a direct descendants of earlier laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act that are now regarded as outright racist. They were “explicitly efforts at racial engineering,” writes Bier. Even though the arguments have changed, “the end result is the same, and this type of government intervention is as inappropriate now as it was then.”

There’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit in immigration policy these days, but removing the per-country green card caps might be one of them. Last year, a House bill to remove the caps for employment visas garnered a whopping 329 cosponsors but did not receive a vote. This year’s Lee/Harris bill already has more than a dozen cosponsors in the Senate.

The only meaningful opposition the idea seems to come from immigration restrictionists like the Center for Immigration Studies, which says lifting the caps will allow greater levels of Indian immigration and create more competition with U.S. workers for tech jobs. But as long as the overall visa limits remain in place, then those concerns will be muted. (Of course, I think those should be lifted as well.)

More high-profile immigration debates will surely continue to roil Congress—which is currently under pressure to approve funding for Trump’s border wall or face the threat of another government shutdown—but hopefully that won’t preclude the possibility of passing a relatively simple fix to help more people come to the United States legally.

“Immigration is often a contentious issue,” says Lee, “but we should not delay progress in areas where there is bipartisan consensus just because we have differences in a other areas.”

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Illinois Seeks Social Media Accounts of Gun Owners: Reason Roundup

State police would inspect social accounts for signs of “mental health issues.” Seldom content to let its coastal counterparts take all the glory for bad ideas, Illinois is following New York’s lead and proposing that all prospective gun buyers give the government access to their social media accounts.

Under a new proposal being considered by the Illinois legislature, people who want a license to own firearms or ammunition would have to submit a list of all their public-facing online accounts to the state police.

State Rep. Daniel Didech (D–Buffalo Grove) suggests that the law is necessary because too many people with “mental health issues” are buying guns. That’s a debatable claim, but at least it’s within the realm of realism. Where Didech goes off the rails is supposing the state authorities could identify dangerous people simply by looking at their social media presence, and that this determination would be sufficient to deny them their First and Second Amendment rights.

It’s also silly to think people with accounts likely to scare off gun-permit granters would actually reveal those accounts to police.

Didech tells the local CBS station: “A lot of people who are having mental health issues will often post on their social media pages that they’re about to hurt themselves or others. We need to give those people the help they need.”

Mental health advocates, the state rifle association, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois are already speaking out against Didech’s proposal.

FREE MINDS

John Boehner chairs National Cannabis Roundtable. The former House speaker is supposed to announce the initiative today. “An industry-funded group to lobby for cannabis reform,” writes Mike Allen, “the group has seven founding companies, including Acreage Holdings, where he’s on the board.”

On the new organization’s homepage, a quote attributed to Boehner says that “the membership of the National Cannabis Roundtable represents every aspect of the cannabis supply chain. Our members operate in 23 states with legal cannabis programs, including the District of Columbia. We are growers, processors, retailers, wellness centers, investors, entrepreneurs, and publicly traded companies.”

FREE MARKETS

The Green Dream, or whatever. On the “Green New Deal” proposed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) said yesterday:

It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The Green Dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?

Later, Pelosi told reporters:

Quite frankly I haven’t seen it, but I do know that it’s enthusiastic, and we welcome all the enthusiasm that’s out there. I’m very excited about it all, and I welcome the Green New Deal and any other proposals.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza writes that “none of this necessarily suggests that there is an any animosity between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez. Rather, what Pelosi’s comment about the ‘Green New Deal’ represents is that the speaker wants to make very clear how things work in the House. AOC may be a star nationally, but in the House she is just a very junior member of Pelosi’s majority— albeit it one with a larger-than-normal megaphone on issues close to her.”

QUICK HITS

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker will testify before the House Judiciary Committe today.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that served as a backhanded way to all but eliminate abortion access in the state.

USA Today is spreading fear that Title IX protections somehow wouldn’t apply to U.S. students participating in their school’s study abroad programs.

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Journalists Criticize CNN for Planning Journalism About Howard Schultz

||| CNNCNN announced Wednesday that it will broadcast a prime-time town hall interview on February 12 with potential-but-not-officially-declared independent presidential candidate Howard Schultz, to be conducted by Poppy Harlow. The announcement was promptly ratioed on Twitter, and subject to sustained criticism from a curious source: journalists.

“Is @CNN consciously making the same mistake as in 2015-16 when it gave endless air time to Trump, down to fixing a camera on his idle plane, and starving opponents of deserved attention?” wondered former New York Times correspondent Clyde Haberman. “Schultz is rich, that’s all. He’s done nothing to merit this attention.”

“This seems like a dubious decision,” judged FiveThirtyEight numbers man Nate Silver. “A lot of other candidates are far more popular and/or more likely to become president than Schultz, but have received far less airtime. He’s also not even officially a candidate yet. And he’s not very well-informed on public policy.”

“This giving air time to rich folks who think it might be fun to run for president thing is how we ended up with #Trump,” concurred CUNY Newmark Journalism School Associate Professor Lisa Armstrong, adding: “#media #fail.”

More like that from Soledad O’Brien, Matthew Yglesias, and so on.

Like a lot of aversion to Schultz from Trump-fearing Democrats, the basic critique from his media skeptics contains a paradox bordering on contradiction. He’s got no constituency! Stop paying attention to him, or Trump might win! But in the name of both media literacy and a lower-temperature political analysis, it’s useful to sort through competing claims and journalistic ref-working over Schultz coverage. Let’s start with a major anxiety threaded through the criticism of CNN:

1) No, Schultz is not, and will not be, anything like the 2020 equivalent of 2015–2016 free-media king Donald Trump.

CNN and the other cable networks did indeed give “endless air time to Trump” last cycle, as Haberman says, but that’s because Trump was a famous television star and oxygen-gobbling business tycoon who was saying and doing and proposing things that no one had ever really seen on a presidential political stage before. Viewers couldn’t look away. As CNN President Jeff Zucker said in October 2016, “If we made any mistake last year, we probably did put too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run….Listen, because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those on the air.”

The journalistic propriety and campaign effects of those ratings-driven decisions are worthy of serious debate and criticism. But based on his early appearances and videos, it is impossible for me to imagine that Schultz, with his much less transgressive political ideas and manners, can make up the vast deficit in pre-existing name recognition with charisma like this:

2) No, Schultz has not “done nothing” to merit media attention outside of getting rich.

Hey, he screws his brand new jeans on one leg at a time, just like you. ||| AmazonSchultz’s perfectly-timed-for-the-campaign book, From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America, debuted this week on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list at number three. Yes, the book benefited from that 60 Minutes profile (somewhere, Julián Castro is shaking his fist toward CBS headquarters), but take another gander at that NYT ranking: Four of the top eight titles are either about Donald Trump or by authors who would like to take his job. (Kamala Harris is down three slots this week to number eight.)

As has been evidenced by cable news ratings the past four years, bestseller lists the past two, and midterm turnout numbers last November, Americans are way keyed up about national politics right now. The early above-average interest in Schultz—and as critic Jack Holmes freely acknowledges in Esquire, “Not much of that coverage has been positive”—may well be correlated with what CNN’s Harry Enten characterizes as “the unusually high percentage of Democrats who are prioritizing winning the general election than finding a candidate who agrees with them on the issues.” Which is to say, Schultz might earn CNN some hate-watch ratings from viewers straining at the leash to take a bite out of Trump.

Schultz is not just some rich rando musing out loud about being a fantasy independent centrist without having thought through the problem for more than a few seconds. He’s a rich rando independent centrist who has expressed willingness to spend up to half a billion dollars on the effort, and (per The Washington Post) “secretly undertook a months-long effort to prepare an independent presidential campaign against the nation’s two-party political system, deploying more than six national polls and laying the groundwork for paid advertising that could debut in the next two months.”

For sure, it’s Schultz’s wealth that put him in position to consider a wallet-draining run against a two-party edifice designed to thwart all nonconformists. But there’s a reason why only one other billionaire outsider—Ross Perot—has ever gone through with it: The fundamentals of such a challenge, particularly in a highly charged partisan moment like ours, are terrible. If Schultz takes the plunge, that’s one helluva of man-bites-dog story.

Ah, but shouldn’t those bad fundamentals steer cable networks away from providing coverage? I vote no.

||| Huffington Post3) Political journalists are poor judges of deciding which candidate doesn’t have a chance. How many publications were predicting nine months ago that the Democratic Party’s most compelling star would be a stylish young socialist from the Bronx? Remember when The Huffington Post noisily announced that it would only cover candidate Donald Trump in the entertainment section?

The rise of Trump and Ocasio-Cortez illustrate a point that is still poorly understood. Yes, the two-party arrangement of American politics is maddeningly strong, but the parties themselves are remarkably weak, vulnerable to local and even national takeovers by ideological insurgents. This makes for a dynamic, unpredictable electoral playing field.

Critics of both Schultz and the journalists who cover him are correct that the plurality of Americans who call themselves “independents” in fact tend to vote along partisan lines, but they’re wrong to ignore that that same cohort is still more likely to switch teams or vote for third parties. And if we are going through some kind of ideological realignment, which is possible if not likely, then the role of nontraditional parties and politicians could easily prove greater than currently projected.

Or not! You’d think that the experience of 2016 would generate more humility among political prognosticators. In reality, much of the media thumbsucking about 2016 lessons learned has been of the dreary we-should-have-gatekeeped-harder variety, which if nothing else seems an odd response to an election marked by expressed anti-elitism.

One great recent example to the contrary of this commentary is this Michael M. Grynbaum piece in The New York Times surveying political reporters and a bunch of contrarian thinkers—Steven Pinker, Susan Fiske, Nassim Nicholas Taleb—about the internal journalistic challenge of questioning one’s own assumptions, particularly when they align with conventional wisdom. “It’s not that journalists missed the signs of Trump’s rise,” Taleb says there, “it’s that journalists and the rest of us were not well equipped to understand the future.” I’ll say.

February 2019 feels a tad premature to declare just about any presidential campaign DOA, even Pete Buttigieg‘s or John Delaney‘s. Individual news organizations have to prioritize, and that’s always going to be a series of judgment calls—declared candidates are generally ahead of exploratory-committee formers who are generally ahead of still-thinking-about-its, but that doesn’t mean Andrew Yang is above Beto O’Rourke, or that anyone has any earthly idea what to do with John McAfee.

Luckily for candidates and consumers alike, we live in a time of highly distributed media competition, where one organization’s biases are another’s opportunity. Which brings us to…

4) Let the political media competition bloom. You know what one nickname for this Democratic campaign season is? The Colbert primary.

CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert is where Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–N.Y.) kicked off her exploratory-committee phase, which was followed by an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow (who was not, as far as I can tell, criticized for giving air time to an unofficially announced candidate). Presidential hopefuls see prime opportunities in late-night anti-Trump comedy, and even high-listener podcasts.

In fact, the more specialized corners of the political/media press has been producing interesting analyses of how candidates are taking advantage of a diverse media landscape this cycle. “The days of a traditional launch rally are mostly behind us,” a Democratic consultant recently told The Hill. “There are so many tools at our disposal, so many different venues to reach mass audiences beyond earned media alone, and we’re going to see every campaign trying to out-innovate the others.”

For sure, there will be a strong mutual interest between cable news and candidates to do more town halls. Why? Because the first such exercise this season, featuring Kamala Harris, drew record (if not quite Trumpian) ratings for CNN. If Schultz rates well next week, expect to see a lot more candidates on the airwaves. Speaking of which, a final—and overriding—point:

5) INTERVIEWS ARE JOURNALISM, PEOPLE.

Kamala Harris under cross-examination produced all sorts of headlines, many of them unflattering—about abolishing private insurance plans, about her controversial record as a prosecutor, and so on. The June 2016 CNN town hall featuring Libertarian candidates Gary Johnson and Bill Weld (which drew “good but not great” ratings) generated controversies that reverberate to this day. Joe Scarborough’s exchange with Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) on MSNBC this week added dimensions to the foreign policy component of 2020 that we had not yet previously experienced.

Cable TV is the easiest target in the political-media ecosphere, but that doesn’t mean the engagements there between journalists and candidates definitionally lack value. Let’s have more of them, not less, and stop treating the airwaves of a number-three news outlet like some kind of faberge egg that needs to be protected and displayed just so, in the name of protecting democracy.

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New York Police Killed Her Son, Then Refused to Answer Her Questions. The Law They’re Hiding Behind Could Soon Be Repealed: New at Reason

In 2017, Constance Malcolm sat across from Kevin Richardson, the NYPD lawyer in charge of prosecuting police discipline cases. Richardson said he couldn’t tell her the pending charges that were about to be presented in an open and public disciplinary trial against the police officer who killed her son.

Five years earlier, NYPD officer Richard Haste had followed Malcolm’s son, 18-year-old Ramarley Graham into Graham’s apartment, believing he had a gun, and fatally shot the unarmed young man. Since then, Malcolm had been trying to claw any information she could out of the department about the police narrative, the aftermath of the shooting, and the history of the narcotics officers who tailed her son from a bodega and shot him to death in his bathroom.

What she discovered, as countless other family members, reporters, and watchdog groups have, is that it is nearly impossible under New York law to hold police accountable. The NYPD would not show her the reports all officers are required to file when they discharge a weapon. It would say nothing about the disciplinary record of the cop who shot her son.

To top it off, she would have to take a day off work to sit through the department trial, because the NYPD official in front of her wouldn’t even utter the upcoming charges the officer would face, nor would the department give her a transcript of the hearing.

“This officer murdered my son, and for me to have to sit through a whole trial just to catch the charges, that shouldn’t happen,” Malcolm says. “I’m like, so why the hell you call me down here to have me sit in this damn office?”

“I don’t know how she held her composure so well, but it was a slap in the face,” says Loyda Colon, co-director of the Justice Committee, a police-reform advocacy group, who was sitting in the office with Malcolm that day.

Last Friday, nearly seven years to the day after Graham’s death, an independent panel released a report, citing Malcolm’s ordeal among others, finding that there is a “fundamental and pervasive lack of transparency into the [NYPD’s] disciplinary process and about disciplinary outcomes.”

The prime culprit behind this culture of secrecy is Section 50-a of New York’s civil rights law. For more than 40 years New York law enforcement, including the biggest police department in the country, has used this expansive exemption to hide a vast array of records about police misconduct.

However, growing public scrutiny, as well as a new Democratic majority in the state legislature, could finally lift that veil of secrecy. A coalition of more than 80 New York civil liberties organizations and advocacy groups are demanding the New York legislature repeal Section 50-a of the New York Consolidated Laws.

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Nursing Shortages Will Put California’s Plans for Universal Healthcare on Hold: New at Reason

Based on his inaugural promises, early administrative appointments and first budget, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing to make some type of universal healthcare coverage the centerpiece of his administration. It is unclear if he will take the single-payer route or focus mainly on expanding access for the state’s residents to various state and federal healthcare programs, including Medicare.

Whatever one thinks about the wisdom of expanding medical care in this manner, it’s clear that demand will increase for medical services. That is the economic reality whenever a highly sought-after service is subsidized, and therefore offered to more people at a discounted price. That means more pressure on the existing system of medical care and a growing need for the services of people who work in the healthcare field.

In particular, Newsom’s proposals—whatever their final details—will exacerbate a long-running problem that California policy makers have thus far failed to address: The state’s growing shortage of nurses. A 2017 report by the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis, a project of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, predicted the need for registered nurses to grow by 28 percent by 2030 largely because of an aging population and an aging workforce. Many states are on track to keep up with the demand, but not California, writes Stephen Greenhut.

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Kurt Loder Review’s Lords of Chaos and The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot: New at Reason

You might say Jonas Åkerlund’s Lords of Chaos is attempting to do for the Norwegian black-metal scene of the late 1980s and early ’90s what Almost Famous did for the classic-rock world of the 1970s. If so, it fails, but mostly because the music connected to this story has so little popular resonance outside of its doomy subculture. The movie does have Emory Cohen playing black-metal murder boy Varg Vikernes, however, and his creepy performance—half sultry, half sinister—is magnetic.

The picture is like a teen-delinquent b-movie from the 1950s, only with more death, more blood, and more church-burnings. Also with the rare sight of crazed black-metal concert-goers chewing on a raw pig’s head that’s been tossed into their midst. Okay, it’s actually not like Almost Famous at all, writes Kurt Loder.

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Brickbat: Under Suspicion

KnifeThe British government has announced new sanctions against those who have been convicted of knife crimes but also against people police simply suspect may be carrying knives. The penalties, which can be applied to those as young as 12, include curfews and bans from social media. The goal, authorities say, is to reduce conflicts between gangs and to discourage youth from carrying knives.

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